Gender as a Verb is a study of gender segregation in the computing industry involving interviews with women and men working within the industry in the North of England. As the title suggests, Fitzsimons’ key premise is that gender is a relational and fluid process of continual negotiation, contradictions, reversals and changes. Aligned with this view of gender as a relational process is the argument that gender segregation or “gendering at work” requires a study of men as well as women in order to examine the discourses of masculinity and femininity that shape social practices within the workplace.
On one level the book describes the author’s “rite of passage” from feminist sociology and Marxism to a qualified postmodernist focus on discourse, which continues to retain a concern for the materialist and structural oppression of women. While Fitzsimons acknowledges the theoretical shifts through which she went during her research, her journey results at times in some disconcerting juxtapositions of material within the book.
The study was originally conceived as a feminist sociological contribution to the existing literature on women’s work, and the book retains strong elements of this endeavour. At the outset, Fitzsimons suggests that selected literature from the 1980s on women in factory‐type positions is description rather than analysis. In turn, Fitzsimons argues, the emergence of Marxist feminist analyses of women and work with their focus on the intersection of patriarchy and capitalism has become an obstacle to the development of a theoretical framework for interpreting gender relations at work. In particular, the concept of patriarchy, and associated dual systems theory, treats gender as a static categorisation and emphasises women’s subordination by men. Moreover, patriarchal oppression as an explanation for gender segregation fails to account either for women’s discourses of resistance at work, or for the “embarrassing fact” (p. 24) that, despite new technologies, economic restructuring and changing workforce composition and relations, women are making conscious choices about their positions in the labour market that reproduce demarcations between women and men’s work.
Fitzsimons also criticises the rise of literature on men and masculinities, including “the crisis of masculinity” thesis, because it bypasses the material reality of women’s oppression by recasting masculinity as a problem for men, rather than as a problem for women. Her dismissal, for instance, of Collinson and Hearn’s (1994) work as a study of men – not gender – seems a little unfair and does not acknowledge either the validity of the field or possible considerations of political correctness on the part of the authors. As if to further support her dismissal of such literature, Fitzsimons claims that, in her interviews with men in computing, she found no evidence of diverse masculinities or “the crisis of masculinity”. She argues that the concern with differences between men “diverts attention from the continuance of gender segregation” (p. 128).
At a positivist level, Fitzsimons brings together some useful empirical evidence on the emergence of gender segregation in the computing industry. As a basis for understanding she provides a succinct description of the various job categories and explains how these make up a hierarchy of positions within the industry, with system analysts and programmers high in status and computer support staff and data entry operators regarded as less important. She then presents evidence that reveals the emergence of gender segregation in the industry. As a non‐traditional industry, in the 1950s and 1960s men and women had an estimated 50 per cent share in programming and analyst jobs. By 1991 the number of women programmers had halved and a pattern of vertical segregation was evident, with women concentrated in the lower‐status and lower‐paid positions. Drawing on some evidence from the interviews, Fitzsimons discusses institutionalised and cultural factors that contribute to this pattern.
However, Fitzsimons’ declared interest is in the gender ideologies (rather than market and employment practices) that contribute to the gendering of occupations as well as people.
The book shifts focus to discourses that contribute to the production and reproduction of gender segregation in the computing industry. On the broad scale, she discusses how the discourses of both science and technology have reinforced masculine power, while tending to present women as victims. Drawing on Foucault’s attempt to balance the emphasis on negative conceptualisations of power with the “productivity of power”, Fitzsimons argues that women as well as men are involved in the exercise of power and agency in the workplace. Thus, she suggests, the analysis of the relationship between women and technology needs to show how women programmers negotiate, resist and transform their technical environment and maintain their feminine subjectivity.
At a more specific level, Fitzsimons examines her interview material for discourses on masculinity and femininity. She argues that two gender discourses are dominant in the workplace: hegemonic masculinity and hegemonic femininity. Her typology of the hegemonic discourse of masculinity represents images, obsessions, occupations and traits associated by writers, following on from Bem’s (1981) sex‐role inventory, with a traditional paradigm of male stereotypes. This idealised and ideological account of the social construction of masculinity structures the modes and varieties of masculinities that are performed by men and “creates confusions, contradictions and ‘crisis”’ (p. 103). Fitzsimons sets forth a parallel concept of hegemonic femininity consisting of two principal discourses: the discourse of sexuality; the discourse of domesticity and family. The strength of both hegemonic masculinity and hegemonic femininity arises out of the supposed naturalness of the sexual division of labour. The interview material is largely explored in terms of resistance to or compliance with these dominant discourses. As indicated previously in this review, male computer workers in this study revealed few conflicts or contradictions in compliance with hegemonic masculinity. When female co‐workers were brought up by the interviewer, males praised women’s qualities but male representations of career identity indicated they were “largely indifferent” to women workers who did not seem to be regarded as rivals or threats to male career progression.
The major conflicts and contradictions for women arise out of the attempt to reconcile work with the discourse of domesticity and family. Fitzsimons acknowledges that the majority of women in her study tended to cope with rather than challenge their responsibilities for domestic labour, seeing them as a consequence of their “choice” (p. 156) to engage in paid employment. Of interest are the four types of responses made by the women to the tension between work and family lives: some women adopted a work model in their organisations and a gender model at home; some tried to negotiate shared responsibilities in the home; some adopted a strategy of careerism and paid others for domestic work; a few challenged the dominant discourses at work by asserting their femininity and position as women workers. Although Fitzsimons does not explicitly say so, what she calls the “passing as organisational men” (p. 161) inherent in the first three responses suggests compliance with the dominant, masculinist discourse of the workplace. Certainly, computing is seen by both men and women in the study as gender‐neutral, and neither the gendered culture of organisation and occupation nor the discourse of domesticity is challenged.
My main problems in reading this book arose from the shifts between structural‐functional type analysis and a quasi‐post‐modernist concern with discourse. I find the increasing trend of writers in the area of gender, such as Halford and Leonard (2001), to select from and combine theoretical and methodological approaches from previously distinct schools of thought, a most admirable and, dare I claim distinctly female, form of good sense. In Fitzsimons’ book this attempt does not always succeed and I think this is partly to do with the final organisation of chapters in the book. Sometimes both assertions and criticisms of existing literature in one part of the book seem to be contradictory to statements and approaches taken in other parts of the book. After the final chapter of Conclusions, an Appendix entitled “Research methodology” is included, which provides Fitzsimons’ definitions of key concepts and her position on some key points. While recognising the difficulties the author faced in the changes from conception of the study to completion of the analysis, I feel the Appendix material would have provided a clearer theoretical positioning and ongoing basis for the book if it had been included as an earlier chapter.
Throughout this book I also feel that Fitzsimons is often over‐selective in her representations of the existing literature she critiques. More specifically, her criticism of social constructionist approaches as being reliant on sex‐role theory in which masculinity and femininity are “fixed roles that are learned, either well or badly, depending on the quality of the socialisation” (p. 99), seems to be an over‐simplification that may confuse social learning explanations with social constructionist views that gender is relational, a process, something that is done, and something other than a two‐system category (Weatherall, 2002). In other words, unlike essentialist models which frame gender as a given and linked to a predetermined set of linguistic behaviours, a social constructionist model problematises gender as a social construction and views language as a set of strategies for negotiating the social landscape (Stubbe et al., 2000). Moreover, a social constructionist approach is not merely concerned with gender as an effect of language or of individual speech acts as Fitzsimons implies; it is also concerned with providing a basis for understanding workplace interactions, for developing strategies for promoting gender equity, and for collective as well as individual action to effect systemic social changes (Stubbe et al., 2000; McConnell‐Ginet, 2000). I suggest that, despite Fitzsimons’ claims for the novelty of her approach, her alternative theoretical framework for the understanding of gendering at work has many parallels with a social constructionist or performative model of gender, and that both approaches attempt to understand “how discourses work in the creation of the material reality of both gender and employment relations” (p. 174).
However, this is certainly a thought‐provoking book, which makes a stimulating contribution to the area of women and work, and provides some valuable information about men, women and gender relations in the computing industry. Fitzsimons’ concern for women’s exercise of agency and power is timely. Her focus on the discourses that reproduce gender segregation seeks to explore the strategies and techniques “that allow the control and exercise of power” (p. 201). Her commitment is to a greater understanding of gender relations in the workplace and to change.
